Reminds me of a community I used to be a part of, when I played the online game Utopia. Over at www.avidgamers.com they provide basic types of communities for alliances and stuff like that, in different games.

Anyhow, those sites do clean out certain markup in a pretty good way - the administrator can choose which tags are allowed - scripting is never, and from what I can tell, the engine that strips such is pretty good.

But they had allowed the <table> and the <div> tags. So me and a friend started impersonating other friends in the forums, mostly for fun, but also to enlighten this problem. We basically did this by creating posts that contained closing </td></tr></table> that were the same as the forums, and then built up a new post "after ours" within our own post, having those guys saying really funny stuff. It took almost two days before the HTML illiterates (no wrong with that, mind you) figured out what the *** happened.

With <div>, we created signature boxes that hung under the menu - something like "This thread contains a post by XXX!" with lots of colors and stuff.

Most people laughed their heads off while we were rummaging around like that, but some did take offense - none that we impersonated though. And it was really funny to see people saying " I did not say that!" when everybody could "see" they did.

Then, of course, we told them which tags to turn off, and no more problems.

Personally, I think that scripts should be filterd out in places like these. I know that I can, and I have, turned them off in the browser for this place, but all it really takes is someone malicious posting, and someone not so careful browsing. I didn't have it turned off in the beginning, and for all I know, someone may already have my password. And javascript in general is not the problem, just when you can post whatever and on a site with login cookies or similar.

You have moved into a dark place.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other